Final Fantasy XI with Hard Disk Drive
This review covers the Sony Playstation 2 release. It comes with a 40GB hard drive that takes only seconds to install. You need to purchase a Sony PS2 Network Adapter separately. Once you've completed the physical installation, you don't need to install any software. All of the gaming software you need to play Final Fantasy XI comes pre-installed. You'll use PlayOnline Viewer to connect to Square-Enix's servers to play Final Fantasy XI. Once you've connected and completed the registration process, you'll be waiting for a while to download all of the current updates. After the updates are downloaded, they're installed automatically. This process can take several hours, simply because there's a lot of stuff to download. If you're connecting via dial-up, you might want to let it sit over night. Once you've downloaded all of the latest updates, it's time to play. Keep in mind that you get to play for free, but only for 30 days. After the initial 30 days, your trial period is over and it's $12.95 a month and if you really want to advance in the game, you'll need to spend a lot more time than 30 days playing.
In addition to Final Fantasy XI, there's another game, Tetra Master. This game lets you play the card game that was introduced in Final Fantasy IX. The PlayOnline Viewer also gives you access to some other features like a newsletter, wallpaper, and a photo gallery. There's also communication features that allows you to interact with other players in chat rooms, e-mail, and you can also keep in touch with other players via your friend list.
Gameplay:
The game of Final Fantasy XI is very complex. You're placed in an online world known as Vana'diel. When you first start the game, you get to create and customize a character. The options you get to pick include your race, sex, job, and appearance. The races you can pick from are Hume, Elvaan, Tarutaru, Mithra, and Galka. The Hume are you average race, similar to the human race. The Elvaans are like humans, but with pointy ears. They're essentially elves. The Tarutaru are a very small race, about half the size of the Humes. The Mithra are a catlike race and they're all female. The Galka are physically the biggest race in this game, huge bodies and heads that look like they have shrunken heads. Also, you can only play as male with this race. After you've selected your character's race, you can begin to customize their appearance. This includes selecting from a variety of faces, hair styles, height, and clothing. Afterwards, it's time to pick your character's job. You can pick from a total of six different basic jobs: warrior, monk, thief, black mage, white mage, and red mage. We'll cover this in a little more detail later. The last part of character creation requires that you pick citizenship with one of three nations: Windurst, San d'Oria, or Bastok. The biggest difference between picking a specific nation will change the specifics of the quests and missions that your character embarks upon.
Like many other RPGs and games in the Final Fantasy series, each job gives your character a specialty. The basic jobs are warrior, monk, thief, black mage, white mage, and red mage. The first three jobs are better for physical attacks and the last three jobs are better for magic. The warrior is your basic fighter class, skilled with a variety of melee weapons and can cause the most physical damage. The monk is like a brawler, best at hand-to-hand combat and usually can't use strong armor. The thief is, well, a thief. This job promises the highest agility and evasion in the game, as well as the ability to steal items from enemies. The mage jobs are typical to the Final Fantasy series. The white mage is best for defensive magic (i.e. healing, protection, etc.) and the black mage is best for offensive magic (i.e. fire, ice, lighting, etc.). Finally, the red mage is a bit of everything, with the ability to use both white and black magic. The red mage also has some aptitude with melee weapons. Past these basic jobs, you can unlock more advanced jobs later in the game. They include the following jobs: summoner, bard, beast master, ranger, samurai, ninja, dragoon, dark knight, and paladin.
The job system allows you to change your character's job whenever you want. Well, maybe not exactly whenever you want. You can only make these changes at your residence. However, when you do so, you lose access to the abilities of the job you were previously employed. For instance, if you're a level 10 warrior and you switch to white mage, you're a level 1 white mage. But as you switch from job to job, you retain job levels and their associated abilities. Your various skills, combat, magic, and craft are also retained. Also, as seen in some of the earlier Final Fantasy games, you can employ a secondary job, referred to as a support job. This gives you the benefit of two jobs at once, allowing you to really customize your character. However, you can't fully utilize your support job, since you are limited to up to half of your main job. For instance, let's say you have jobs red mage and thief at levels 30 and 20, respectively. If your main job is a red mage and your support job is a thief, your thief will only register at level 15, half of your main job. Similarly, if you select thief as your main job and red mage as your subjob, your subjob will register at 10. While this sounds exciting (and it is) you can't do this right off. You need to accomplish a special quest to gain this ability, but one requirement to this quest is that you need a job at level 30.
Along with your character's job, you'll have access to some special abilities. Each class has its own set of special abilities and after you have used an ability, you must wait a certain duration of time before it can be used again. For instance, a thief can only use "steal" every five minutes. Also, every class has a special two hour ability. For instance, the thief has "perfect dodge", which allows the character to dodge all physical non-special attacks and the white mage has "benediction", which will heal your party's hit points. As your character advances in a specific job, more special abilities will be unlocked. Another portion of the abilities relate to specific weapon types. For instance, when you reach a skill level of 10 with a sword, you learn fast blade.
Past abilities, there are skills and they come in three flavors: combat, magic, and craft. These skills increase in level the more that your character uses them. Combat skills cover your characters aptitude with melee weapons, ranged weapons, and defensive skills like evasion, parrying, and so on. Magic skills are only available to characters who are currently employed with jobs of a magic related nature. These covers skills with offensive magic, defensive magic, and so on. Finally, craft skills determine your characters ability to perform certain crafts. They include crafts like fishing, skill with a fishing pole, cooking, skill to create gourmet foods, and smithing, skill to create weapons. There are other crafts like woodworking, goldsmithing, clothcraft, leathercraft, bonecraft, and alchemy. Each which give you the ability to create special and even some useless items. This adds a pretty interesting twist to the game, in terms of promoting player interaction. You won't be able to master them all and if you need a certain item created, you can always find another player who can do it.
Furthering the very complex and diverse components of this game, another major aspect is the multiplayer gaming experience. While you can play this game on your own, it can be a little difficult. I found that playing solo was a pain, because it's so easy to get killed. From time to time, you'll really want to form a small party to get through some of the harder quests. Quite frankly, at the lower levels, just about everything is hard. The multiplayer aspect of this game is very important, whether you are forming a group to accomplish a quest or just to level up. The quests are used to help you build your character's reputation and get special items. There are also missions, which further your character along in the game's storyline.
In addition, there are some other "cool" aspects of the multiplayer gaming experience. There's an auction house, which allows you to pseudo-eBay any item in your inventory. Chances are, if you have it, there's someone out in the world who wants to buy it. You can also setup a bazaar and sell items for a fixed price, get married, communicate with your friends and complete strangers, and trade items amongst other things.
The combat system is fairly basic. You select a target and engage combat by selecting attack or using attack magic. Once you're engaged in combat, physical attacks are automatically executed. You also have the option to cast spells or use your special abilities. However, combat can also be engaged by monsters! Some of the stronger monsters will target you! This can be a problem, as sometimes you'll get a group of nasty orcs attacking you all at once. When that happens, you'd be run for the hills or hope that a friendly player is nearby to help you out.
The controls in this game have a fairly easy learning curve, though some take a little getting used too, simply because there's you can do. With the PS2 version, you can use the dual analog controller, a USB mouse, and a USB keyboard in whatever combination that you like. I found that I mostly used the PS2 controller, simply because it was more relaxing to sit on the couch while playing. However, you'll still want to make sure to have a USB keyboard, because communication with the onscreen keyboard takes a long time. You can also configure macros to do things like express e-motions or perform certain actions.
Overall, this game has a lot to offer. It allows you to customize and create very special characters, by means of a variety of jobs, skills, and abilities. The multiplayer gaming aspect also provides a great deal of game play, with a strong emphasis of player interaction. The game is pretty much never ending, which means countless hours of entertainment. Sure, it can be a bore in the early stages, simply because leveling up takes time, but being able to do things like formulate friendships and interact in the online community really gives this game a fun appeal.
Graphics:
The graphics in this game are fairly good. The colors are fairly rich and work well to show detail. However, this game is a little blockier than others, with detail being slightly rough. This is mostly due to the nature of the game, as an online game the graphics can't be too rich, otherwise game play would be really sluggish. Still, the graphics are pretty good and the game runs smoothly.
Audio:
The audio in this game is pretty good. All sounds come off very clear, but it's nothing too special. The music changes with event and location, but it tends to get annoying. I ended up turning it off. The sound effects are a bit more subtle and not annoying. There really isn't anything special about them. They tend to be very simplistic.
Conclusion:
I don't have a lot of experience with massive multiplayer online role playing games. In fact, the only one that I've played was Microsoft's Asheron's Call. Quite frankly, I never found the game too appealing. This was mostly because I never had the chance to take full advantage of the multiplayer aspect. I went completely solo. However, I was pretty happy with Final Fantasy XI, which could have been because I like a good role playing game or maybe it's because I interacted with other players. The bottom line is that I was pretty happy with this game. It started off slow, but as started to level up my character, things began to pick up. Before I knew it, I was getting invited to join parties and I found people to play with regularly. Final Fantasy XI has plenty of game play that should keep you (and hopefully your friends) busy for countless hours.